Sunday, February 22, 2015

Oscar Night

Roy has been my go-to Oscar prognosticator, mainly because I'm not a big movie fan, but I am a big Roy fan. The only Oscar contender that I saw last year, indeed the only movie I saw on the big screen, was The Imitation Game, which I reviewed. Special thanks to my great and good friends at the Secret Science Club for scoring tickets for a special preview of the film.

In my review I predicted that the film would receive multiple nominations:

I predict that the film is going to do extremely well come Oscar time. It's a WW2 film. It's about a man with a mental condition who is brilliant. It has a gorgeous young star playing a brainiac. That's all catnip for the Academy. I don't know if it will sweep, but I think it'll have a Best Picture nod, with a Best Leading Actor nomination for Benedict Cumberbatch and a Best Leading Actress nod for Keira Knightley.

It would be unfair to the film and to Turing to characterize it as "Rainman vs the Nazis", but in the interest of humor, I will make that grotesque distortion... hell, the film took liberties with history for dramatic effect. Roy, being more charitable, dubbed it "A Beautiful Mind meets Casablanca!"

Here is where I confess that Oscar prognostications are not rooted in any way in my knowledge of the actual workings of the Academy, they are one-hundred percent based on wry observations of Oscar nominations, with this one being particularly devastating:

A film about a guy on the autism spectrum defeating the Nazis? In my jaundiced view of the Oscars, that's like crack!

2 comments:

Honestly, the last time I was in a movie theater was to see the Bruce Willis African shoot 'em up "Tears of the Sun". I just don't find sitting in a big dark building with a hundred strangers to be particularly comfortable experience.

I don't understand people's interest in the Oscars at all. Every industry gives out annual awards. Nobody cares who wins the statue at the American Dental Association, but movies have movie stars!

An industry I'm not involved in, giving awards to its members who don't know me and I don't know, over a bunch of categories and entrants with which I'm largely unfamiliar? Does NOT sound like a night of sparkling entertainment to me...

About Me

The Big Bad Bald Bastard is a character played by Monsieur _______ of the City of Y______. The role of the Bastard is a handy one to play on subways, walking the streets, and in dive-bars, when being a nerdy, bookish sort is not to one's advantage.